


The Knife

by Stonestrewn



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Mild Gore, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-26
Updated: 2013-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-16 06:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/858718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/pseuds/Stonestrewn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war has ended and Javik travels the galaxy, observing the rebuilding, revisiting acquaintances.</p>
<p>In a house he never wished for is a knife on display.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Knife

**Author's Note:**

> Because it's easy to gloss over a tag: this fic contains suicidal ideation so be mindful of that if you are sensitive to the subject.

Javik has sharpened his knife.

He has washed his hands once for each member of his crew, worked the metal with fingers clean of the present. He has tested the edge on his own carapace, felt it give to the steel without resistance.

The asari stands in the house he never wished to have and admires the blade on display.

“How beautiful,” she says. “Is it ceremonial?”

Javik leaves the room.

\--

They were all wrong. The Citadel was not the crown of civilization; it was the tool to bring it to its end.

The walls still smell of death, reek of guts and excrement and fear. The bodies are gone and the floors have been hosed but they will never get rid of the stench. Javik doesn’t go far from the docking bay and he keeps his hands to his sides. He doesn’t need to see what happened here. It’s a story even older than him.

Keepers pass him by; the unstoppable determination driving them forward is at odds with the emptiness in their eyes. Despite the unsettling nature of their existence there are things about them that feel more familiar than the mammals and lizard people that surround him elsewhere – their joints, the sheen of their carapaces, the structure of their skulls – but familiarity has never brought him comfort. These, too, are hollow.

He recognizes the human by the tattoos. She is near bare-chested even in the unheated corridors of this husk that were once many worlds in one. When she spots him her biotics flicker out. Javik waits while she directs an order to her team and makes her way over, resigning himself to reunion.

“Heard you were out cruising.” Her expression is neither approving nor displeased. “What gives?”

“Watching,” he says. “Destruction, I have witnessed. Never rebuilding.”

“Yeah, fuck that. Get useful or get lost.”

Her biotics flare again and she returns to the task at hand. They’re moving a collapsed wall out the way, clearing the entrance to one of the wards. She has a small number of humans who look almost as war-torn as their surroundings under her command.

“The slaughter here,” he says to her straining back, “it has left a stain you can never wash out.”

With an admittedly well-coordinated lift, the humans dislodge a massive metal beam from the rest of the rubble.

“Move your lazy ass out of the way and get the fuck out, we don’t have enough resources for freeloaders,” she snaps at him, a bit of a strain in her voice.

Javik steps aside for the beam, but doesn’t leave.

“You will not be able to reclaim this as your home.”

She turns her head to look at him and the new scar tissue slashed across her cheeks is intrusively bright, a scream of red.

“Watch us.”

\--

The blood is in the blade.

No matter how many times it is polished, when he touches it he smells it anew, the salt-sweet tang of the lives of those he called comrades seeping into the sand. He feels skin and flesh slicing, the sudden hardness of bone. Friends pouring through his fingers until the pulse goes out.

As he tends to the edge his hands reflect in the steel.

They are, as always, devastatingly clean.

\--

The greenery of Tuchanka is frail but determined, sprouting between broken pillars, through the cracks in the paving. It is a slow but steady campaign to overtake the ruins. If allowed to work in peace, they will succeed.

The krogan female, the shaman, grabs Javik’s arm to stop him mid-step. 

“Careful,” she says, pointing to a flower right in his path, a small thing with a thick stem and red, leathery buds. “It has been waiting a long time to bloom.”

With the mask she wears he can’t tell if she’s smiling.

“Whose fault is that?” he says and shakes free.

Further into the fallen city a small creek runs through the once-grand halls. It whispers past the monuments of heroes with forgotten names, it murmurs below the arches of dried out aqueducts and echoes against the withered stone as it forges its own, new path.

Javik steps down to the waterline, where his feet sink into the damp soil, pliant under his soles. The scent of mud is musky and rich, but not altogether unpleasant. It smells of life in here though the walls speak only of the dead.

For a krogan, the female shaman is light on her feet. Javik doesn’t notice she has followed him until their shadows almost touch.

“The water is fresh,” she says. She kneels to dip a hand into the water, pulls the cloth from her mouth and drinks.

Javik watches her as she straightens. Her posture holds no hostility.

“This planet once died for your hands,” he says. “The empire would have given you no second chance.”

“We’re lucky not to live under your empire.”

The muscles in his neck are tense.

“The empire would have seen that you do not deserve to mourn a loss you caused yourself.”

“The grief is still there.”

The hour nears midday, the merciless sun casting harsh heat on scorched earth, but the plants roll up their leaves and fold up their petals and hold out until the evening and the fall of the dew. Tuchanka is a graveyard turned a very stubborn garden.

He dips a hand into the stream and tastes the water.

\--

He would have been fine with a berth by the engines, an ambulatory bed for an armored sleep. On a ship, any ship, now that the rest of them have landed. Instead, they gifted him a house.

His resistance was decisively overridden. Obligation breeds persistence, it would seem.

The memory shard glows overlooked by empty walls, surrounded by furniture that barely has his imprint. It’s the only thing of his own that he brought – the memory shard, and the knife.

The blade is always sharp.

He won’t be staying long.

\--

Javik expects the asari to keep him waiting, but Liara comes to see him almost right away. Her suit is impeccably neat and her movements task-oriented, but there is an air of exhaustion around her, her scales matted by many nights of too little sleep.  If he touched her he would be able to determine the exact number. He puts his hands palms down on the railing instead.

“I am glad to see you,” she says.

“Are you,” he says, voice flat.

“Yes.” She crosses her arms over her chest and leans back a little. “But there is still time to change my mind.”

They’re on a balcony overlooking the bay. A balcony or a bridge or a porch - the sweeping lines of Thessian architecture enjoy muddling the concepts and merging them into vague, multipurpose spaces as open to the sea winds as they can be. Javik openly frowns at the wastefulness of curved walls and empty halls with no function beyond the aesthetic, but to himself he must admit it doesn’t grate as much as it could. The air of serenity it strives for is often achieved.

Below, the ground is level, a blank spot of emptiness and gravel in the middle of a city dense with rising towers, apartment complexes and large camps of temporary pre-fabs.

She follows his gaze.

“That is where the old monasteries used to be. There are plans for reconstruction,” she says, presuming this is information he wants.

Javik turns his back to the view. Liara, as always, refuses to read signals.

 “Have you given any more thought to it?” she asks. “To the book?”

“No,” he lies.

“Please do. It would mean so much if you would give us the opportunity to learn more.”

“For what purpose?”

“Well.” The question seems to puzzle her. “I personally think history serves its own purpose. It can be a tool to understand the world of the present, but to keep the memories alive is also a way to show respect, sometimes even reverence, for the ones who-“

“None of it matters,” he interrupts.

Liara purses her lips. She puts her hands palms down beside his on the railing. Her scales are matted, but when she looks at him her eyes are bright and blue.

 “I disagree.”

Below, the asari of Thessia slowly fill in the blanks.

\--

The rotunda has been taken by trees.

There is soil under his feet, not paving. There is a net of winding roots instead of stone. The trunks are wide, high, and colossal, the crowns twine together. He can’t see the stars.

The night is old. Things are already waking and the air has a different texture: wetter, fresher, the scents are shifting. Dawn is drawing ever nearer and from the humidity he guesses it might rain. It would be welcome. The heat weighs on him, slows his steps.

No telling where he is, the land has been scrubbed clean of his people. The city that was ancient when he was very young is long since buried. The language of the landmarks has morphed until unreadable – the land tells him nothing. He stops.

It could be here. This very spot. Where their blood spilled, beat by beat. He kneels and touches it, brushes away layers of dry leaves until he can rake his fingers through damp earth, search for it, an archeologist of pain, but all that’s there is the undisturbed changing of the seasons, of little lives set on feeding and breeding and nothing more.  

This earth is not the earth it was, fifty thousand years of winds and worms and falling leaves have turned it over, eaten it and covered it and decayed all across it. These atoms are not the ones. There is nothing for him here to read.

The wind is picking up speed, coaxing the trees into song. He’s scooping the leaves back, illogically, covering his tracks. They stick to his fingers. They crumble under his touch. The sensations are vivid, memory-clear. Of thin fragments pulverizing between the pad of his thumb and the tip of his first finger. The relief of veins on the underside of the fresher leaves, delicate but self-assured, clear in its purpose. The rough bark of fallen twigs, the soft moss. Silent in his hands but not dead against his skin. He can feel the pulse of it all, relentlessly alive.

In a house he never wished for is a knife on display.

The day keeps dawning.


End file.
